What Behaviour Predications Might You Make If You Knew That an Employee Had Locus of Control

The locus of control can either be internal (meaning you believe that you control yourself and your life) or external (meaning you believe that your environment, some higher power or other people control your decisions and your life). It was developed by Rotter in 1954 as an important aspect of personality.

Empirical research findings have implied the following differences between internals and externals:

1. Internals are more likely to work for achievements, to tolerate delays in rewards and to plan for long-term goals, whereas externals are more likely to lower their goals. After failing a task, internals re-evaluate future performances and lower their expectations of success, whereas externals may raise their expectations. These differences relate to differences in achievement motivation (as noted above, Rotter (1966) believed that internals tend to be higher in achievement motivation than externals). However, empirical findings have been ambiguous here. There is some evidence that sex-based differences may complicate these findings, with females being more responsive to failures, males to successes.

2. Going back to Bialer's (1961), considerable data suggest that internal locus of control is associated with increased ability to delay gratification. However, at least one study has found this effect does not apply to all samples. Walls and Miller (cited in Lefcourt, 1976) found an association between internal locus and delay of gratification in second and third grade children, but not in adults who were vocational rehabilitation clients.

3. Internals are better able to resist coercion. This relates to higher outer-directedness of externals, another factor which Rotter (1966) believed distinguished the two orientations.

4. Internals are better at tolerating ambiguous situations. There is also a lot of evidence in clinical research that internality correlates negatively with anxiety, and that internals may be less prone to depression than externals, as well as being less prone to learned helplessness. However, this does not mean that the emotional life of the internal is always more positive than that of the external, as internals are known to be more guilt-prone than externals.

5. Externals are less willing to take risks, to work on self-improvement and to better themselves through remedial work than internals.

6. Internals